LinuxConhttp://www.pcper.com
PC Perspectivehttp://www.pcper.com/images/podcast-logo-600x600.pngenGabe Newell LinuxCon Keynote. Announcement Next Week.http://www.pcper.com/news/Editorial/Gabe-Newell-LinuxCon-Keynote-Announcement-Next-Week
<p>Valve Software, as <a href="http://www.pcper.com/news/General-Tech/Half-Life-Source-Beta-Linux-and-OSX">demonstrated a couple of days ago</a>, still believe in Linux as the future of gaming platforms. Gabe Newell discussed this situation at LinuxCon, this morning, which was streamed live over the internet (and I <a href="http://www.pcper.com/news/Editorial/Gabe-Newell-LinuxCon-Keynote-Announcement-Next-Week">transcribed after the teaser break</a> at the bottom of the article). Someone decided to rip the stream, not the best quality but good enough, and put it on Youtube. I found it and embed it below. Enjoy!</p>
<p align="CENTER"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Gzn6E2m3otg" width="480"></iframe></p>
<p>Gabe Newell highlights, from the seventh minute straight through to the end, why proprietary platforms look successful and how they (sooner-or-later) fail by their own design. Simply put, you can control what is on it. Software you do not like, or even their updates, can be stuck in certification or even excluded from the platform entirely. You can limit malicious software, at least to some extent, or even competing products.</p>
<p>Ultimately, however, you limit yourself by not feeding in to the competition of the crowd.</p>
<p class="rteindent1"><em>If you wanted to get your cartridge made you bought it, you know, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOB_%28shipping%29">FOB</a> in Tokyo. If you had a competitive product, miraculously, your ROMs didn&#39;t show up until, you know, 3 months after the platform holder&#39;s product had entered market and stuff like that. And that was really where the dominant models for what was happening in gaming ((came from)).</em></p>
<p class="rteindent1"><em>But, not too surprisingly, open systems were advancing faster than the proprietary systems had. There used to be these completely <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denovo">de novo</a> graphics solutions for gaming consoles and they&#39;ve all been replaced by PC-derived hardware. The openness of the PC as a hardware standard meant that the rate of innovation was way faster. So even though, you would think, that the console guys would have a huge incentive to invest in it, they were unable to be competitive.</em></p>
<p>Microsoft attempts to exert control over their platform with <i>modern Windows</i><span style="font-style: normal"> which is met by a year-over-year regression in PC sales; at the same time, PC <a href="http://www.pcper.com/news/General-Tech/AMD-Gains-GPU-Market-Share-Last-Quarter">gaming is the industry hotbed</a> of innovation and it is booming as a result. In a time of </span><span style="font-style: normal">declining sales </span><span style="font-style: normal">in</span><span style="font-style: normal"> PC hardware, Steam saw a 76% growth</span><span style="font-style: normal"> (unclear but it sounds like revenue)</span><span style="font-style: normal"> from last year.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-style: normal">Valve really believes the industry will shift toward a model with little divide between creator and consumer.</span><span style="font-style: normal"> The community has been &quot;an order of magnitude&quot;</span><span style="font-style: normal"> more productive than the actual staff of Team Fortress 2.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-style: normal">Does Valve want to compete with that?</span></p>
<p class="rtecenter"><span style="font-style: normal"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/gvdf5n-zI14" width="560"></iframe></span></p>
<p><span style="font-style: normal">This will only happen with open platforms. Even the consoles, with systems sold under parts and labor costs</span><span style="font-style: normal"> </span><i>to</i><span style="font-style: normal"> exert control</span><span style="font-style: normal">, have learned to embrace the indie developer</span><span style="font-style: normal">. The next gen consoles market indie developers, prior to launch, seemingly more than the industry behemoths and that includes their own titles.</span><span style="font-style: normal"> They open their platforms a little bit but it might still not be enough to hold off the slow and steady advance of PC gaming be it through Windows, Linux, or even web standards.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-style: normal">Speaking of which, Linux and web standards are oft criticized because they are fragmented. Gabe Newell, intentionally or unintentionally, claimed proprietary platforms are <strong>more</strong> fragmented. </span><span style="font-style: normal">Open platforms have multiple bodies push and pull the blob but it all tends to flow in the same direction. Proprietary platforms have lean bodies with control over where they can go, just many of them. You have a dominant and a few competing platforms for each sector: phones and tablets, consoles, desktops, and so forth.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-style: normal">He noted each has a web browser and, <strong><em>because</em></strong> the web is an</span><span style="font-style: normal"> </span><span style="font-style: normal">open</span><span style="font-style: normal"> standard</span><span style="font-style: normal">, is the </span><i><b>most unified</b></i><span style="font-style: normal"> experience</span><span style="font-style: normal"> across devices of multiple sectors. Open fragmentation is small compared to the gaps between proprietary silos across sectors.</span> <em>((As a side note: Windows RT is also designed to be one platform for all platforms but, <a href="http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Editorial/Windows-You-Love-Gone">as we have been saying for a while</a>, you would prefer an open alternative to all RT all the time... and, according to the second and third paragraphs of this editorial, it will probably suffer from all of the same problems inherent to proprietary platforms anyway.</em><em>))</em></p>
<p class="rteindent1"><em>Everybody just sort of automatically assumes that the internet is going to work regardless of wherever they are. There may be pluses or minuses of their specific environment but nobody says, &quot;Oh I&#39;m in an airplane now, I&#39;m going to use a completely different method of accessing data across a network&quot;. We think that should be more broadly true as well. That you don&#39;t think of touch input or game controllers or living rooms as being things which require a completely different way for users to interact or acquire assets or developers to program or deliver to those targets.</em></p>
<p class="rteindent1"><em>Obviously if that is the direction you are going in, Linux is the most obvious basis for that and none of the proprietary, closed platforms are going to be able to provide that form of grand unification between mobile, living room, and desktop.</em></p>
<p class="rteindent1"><em>Next week we&#39;re going to be rolling out more information about how we get there and what are the hardware opportunities that we see for bringing Linux into the living room and potentially pointing further down the road to how we can get it even more unified in mobile.</em></p>
<p>Well, we will certainly be looking forward to next week.</p>
<p>Personally, for almost two years I found it weird how Google, Valve, and Apple (if the longstanding rumors were true) were each pushing for wearable computing, Steam Box/Apple TV/Google TV, and content distribution at the same time. I would not be surprised, in the slightest, for Valve to add media functionality to Steam and Big Picture and secure a spot in the iTunes and Play Store market.</p>
<p>As for how wearables fit in? I could never quite figure that out but it always felt suspicious.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.pcper.com/news/Editorial/Gabe-Newell-LinuxCon-Keynote-Announcement-Next-Week">Read on for our transcript of the keynote speech. Bare with us, it is a little bit rough.</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.pcper.com/news/Editorial/Gabe-Newell-LinuxCon-Keynote-Announcement-Next-Week" target="_blank">read more</a></p>http://www.pcper.com/news/Editorial/Gabe-Newell-LinuxCon-Keynote-Announcement-Next-Week#commentsEditorialGeneral TechSystemsMobileShows and ExposGabe NewellLinuxConSteam BoxTue, 17 Sep 2013 01:15:47 +0000Scott Michaud58452 at http://www.pcper.com